MU student groups work to educate voters

Syed Ejaz of Columbia was in elementary school when his dad tuned into the Democratic National Convention on television and then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama gave a speech about a unified America.

"I was a fifth-grader, I was detached from politics," Ejaz, now a University of Missouri freshman, recalled last week. "But that got me fired up as a kid. That was the beginning."

This year, Ejaz is as fired up as ever. It's the first time he'll be able to vote in a presidential election, and he's spent the past several months campaigning locally for the president. On Thursday, he joined the campaign of Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill to stump for her on the MU campus.

Hundreds of MU students have taken to the streets to rally peers for the Nov. 6 election.

On the MU campus alone, the Associated Students of the University of Missouri, a system-wide student lobbying organization, registered 6,000 new voters, said Patricia Poe, assistant legislative director for the group known as ASUM.

ASUM and the Graduate Professional Council also teamed up to make sure students know who they're voting for when they go to the polls. They just completed an in-depth, non-partisan assessment detailing where federal and state candidates stand on issues involving higher education. Candidates were sent letters requesting information, and the groups relied on campaign websites to fill in gaps when candidates didn't respond, said Jesse Kremenak, a legislative coordinator for the graduate student group.

Reagan Nielsen is mostly relying on social media to help her spread the word and encourage people to vote for pro-life candidates. She's the president of Mizzou Students for Life, which uses a Facebook site to educate visitors about where the candidates stand.

"I vote pro-life first," she said, parroting the name of a national campaign. "Mizzou Students for Life are getting involved in that."

Contrary to beliefs that college students lean left, Poe said her group has talked to people with a wide range of political views.

"There definitely has been a variety," she said. "A lot of students do have clear-cut positions in terms of the presidential election, both left and right. When it comes to the other candidates, we noticed some confusion, and they didn't know enough about them."

The ASUM/GPC assessment aims to provide that information without steering anyone to a particular candidate, she said.

The group gave A's and B's to state senators and representatives based on their support for student-pushed legislation, not which party they belong to.

In the 19th Senate District race, Sen. Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, and opponent Rep. Mary Still, D-Columbia, received A's for supporting student curator legislation. Still also got a shout out for her work on trying to increase cigarette taxes, and Schaefer was praised for increasing higher education funding as appropriations chairman.

Rep. Chris Kelly, who is running unopposed as a Democrat, got an A, as well as Rep. Stephen Webber. Webber's opponent, Fred Berry, along with other local candidates who do not currently hold a political position, was not assessed.

Kremenak said he believes students can make a difference. He pointed out that the number of new MU voters almost doubles the 3,500 votes that decided John McCain's Missouri win in the 2008 presidential election.

"We don't have much money for lobbying efforts, but I think the strength we have is in numbers," he said. "And a lot of our population is concentrated, so we're able to spread messages a lot easier among this age group than it is through other age groups."